to splash water down her bosom, then glanced up sharply. “What are you staring at, Lew-Lew? Didn’t you get a good enough look when you were spying on us, you perv?”
But there was no heat to her words-in fact, she pulled the neck of her suit out even farther and bent over to give him a better look, though he couldn’t have seen much in the darkness.
“Put the zeppelins away, honey cakes.” Phil was climbing the ladder to the five-meter board Hokey’d had installed a few years ago. “The man has just lost his wife.”
“All the more reason,” replied Emily, chuckling.
Lewis was thoroughly disconcerted. He didn’t know how to take it-in its own way, this moment was as weird as all the weird moments that had preceded it in the course of the previous twenty-four hours.
“What’s the matter with you people?” he whispered urgently, wishing he’d gone a little easier on the Reserve. “My wife is dead, cops are all over the fucking place, you come over here for a swim, flash your titis, and crack jokes? You must be insane.”
“At the risk of sounding petty,” said Emily, “you should have invited us over for a swim a long time ago. It would have have been the neighborly thing to do.”
“Look, you’re going to get your money-it’s just going to take a few weeks, until I get-”
“Didn’t come for the money.” Emily dived forward, breast-stroked fifteen feet to the side of the pool, came up blowing like a porpoise. “Say, Lew, would you mind turning on the pool lights?”
Exhausted after a near-sleepless night in the hospital and a stressful day with the police, Lewis decided that the path of least resistance was the only path for him.
“Sure, what the fuck,” he said, slipping the pistol into the waistband of his shorts with one hand and holding out the half-empty bottle in the other. “Care for a drink?”
Lewis might have been an exception to the St. Luke saying that white folks shouldn’t drink white rum-after all, he bahn deh-but the Epps were certainly not. By ten o’clock Phil was stretched out high above the turquoise glow of the illuminated pool, snoring through his beard-how he’d gotten back up on the high board in the first place, nobody could say-while Emily appeared to Lewis to have reached that stage of alcoholic clarity and bonhomie that customarily precedes either a blackout, a bar fight, or a drunken screw.
“Em?” said Lewis. They were reclining side by side on chaises, protected from mosquitos by a subsonic pulser from the Sharper Image catalog, and from the slight evening chill by plush pool towels the size of bedsheets, embossed with the Apgard crest-two royal palms superimposed over the red field and white cross of the Danish flag. Lewis hadn’t gone into the water on account of his stitches.
“Emily?”
“Lewis?”
“Tell me.”
“About what?”
“You know.”
She sighed. Her head lolled toward him. Her wet hair was brushed straight back from her rounded, somewhat bulbous forehead. Reflections from the underwater lights, silver-blue Tinkerbell flashes, played across her homely features. “No.”
“I want to know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Was it quick? Did she suffer?”
“Did you want her to?” Emily reached under Lewis’s towel, patted his thigh.
He removed her hand before it could creep any farther, gave it a firm but gentle squeeze, and let it fall between the chaises. “No.”
“Then she didn’t.”
“What’s it like?”
“Dying?”
“Killing somebody.”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Hunh?”
“Our deal,” she said sharply-so sharply that Lewis found himself wondering just how drunk she really was. “It’s changed. We don’t want the money.”
“You don’t?”
Emily reached under the towel again, but this time she didn’t bother patting his thigh. Instead she went straight for his package, gave it a friendly squeeze under his shorts. “No, we don’t. Not the money.”
“Then what
“An alibi as good as yours for the Machete Man’s next murder. And you want to give us one.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
The squeeze turned into a caress. “Because you’re in this as deeply as we are. Because leaving us without an alibi is tantamount to leaving yourself without one. Because if they nail us, they nail you.”
Lewis felt himself sobering up fast. “Let me get this straight: you want
“Lewis!” Her voice was sharp, the hand creeping under his shorts was gentle, knowing. “Remember what Ben Franklin said: if we don’t hang together, we shall all hang separately.”
Lewis shuddered, partly because she now had his balls cupped in her palm, and partly because up to that moment he had never thought of that particular old saw as applying to himself-and literally, at that.
Chapter Five
1
Pender’s travel alarm woke him at seven o’clock on Friday morning. “Island time, my ass,” he muttered to the gecko on the nightstand. The autopsy of the Machete Man’s most recent known victim was scheduled for eight o’clock. (That
The lizard rolled its eyes-independently of each other-in commiseration.
Over coffee on the patio twenty minutes later, Pender asked Sigrid Coffee why the gecko was at his bedside every morning.
“A mosquito net is the gecko equivalent of an all-night, all-you-can-eat buffet,” explained Ziggy, a slender and apparently ageless blond. She also told him that according to island legend, the little lizards were possessed of a group mind, like ants or bees in a hive, only more so. “In the vernacular: ‘What one see, dey all see, what one know, dey all know.’ ”
After coffee, Pender decided to take the Vespa rather than ride into town with Julian. There was something about the warm breeze in his face, the palm trees, the Caribbean that…well, that had him humming “Born to Be Wild” again.
The autopsy itself was uneventful. Pender had seen Y-cut torsos before, had seen the human body with all its secrets revealed often enough that although his stomach still lurched occasionally, his mind no longer went drifting off on eschatological tangents at the sight of somebody’s various internal organs being removed, inspected, weighed, and described in detail.
As it turned out, Lindsay Hokansson Apgard’s internal organs were all in tiptop shape, while her outer organ, her epidermis, was intact and unmarked except of course for the missing hand. If the preliminary tox screens held up, the provisional cause of death-exsanguination due to traumatic amputation of the right hand-would become the official one.
The police would not, however, release even the official cause of death to the public, much less tell them about the Machete Man, Chief Coffee had decreed. It would have been a different story if they had information that might help potential victims protect themselves, said Julian-if they had identified a target population, for instance,
